Safari: a philosophy. With wildlife photography, safari advice and free cookies from a safari guide in Africa…

Wild Puppy Love

This morning we’d barely left the lodge when my tracker, Magic Albert, spotted some Wild Dog tracks in the road and hopped off to investigate. Wild dog tracks can be nearly impossible to follow because the dogs run WILD. They run up. They run down. They run in circles. They run here. And there. And back again. When they’re on the move, they’re on the move. When Magic Man tracks a leopard, he can think like a leopard. No one can think like a Wild Dog. Unless they’ve consumed lethal levels of sugar.

After a minute or so, Magic Albert called me over to show me how fresh he felt these tracks were. So fresh in fact, that as my tracker and I were sitting nose to the ground, inspecting paw prints, my guests were happily snapping photos of the wild dogs who’d come from nowhere and were now standing right in front of the vehicle.

The dogs are never easy to keep up with, but we managed to spend some quality time with the puppies, who’d hung back while mummy, daddy, aunties and uncles had gone off in pursuit of unfortunate antelopes.

The puppies always stay out of the way when the adults are hunting, and for good reason. Firstly, they would totally screw up the hunt, the way baby lions and cheetahs so often do. But also, why hunt when you’ve got a massive family with overtly altruistic tendencies who are going to come and regurgitate all the meat you could ever dream of? Regurgalicious.

So here they are, a few snaps of this morning’s very energetic little puppies. Not the greatest photographic subject when you’re still trying to figure out all the little buttons and knobs on your camera. But more on that later. Love. Puppy love.

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